Sunday Morning, July 14, 2019 AM Part 1

I'll be reading out of Jeremiah 31, here in a moment. Jeremiah chapter 31.

Let me begin with a word of prayer. Father, I thank you for those you have brought here today.

Thank you for gathering us together on this first day of the week. The day of the week where your son rose from the grave.

You have raised him from the dead. You've lifted him up. You have raised him up to your right hand.

Where he reigns as the ruler of the kings of the earth. We give praise to Christ this day.

I thank you that on this day, as we think of Christ, as we pay attention to who he is revealed from your word, that this will govern our thinking and our living, our feeling and our relating the coming week.

For it is Christ who is Lord of lords and King of kings. It is Christ who has a name which is above every name.

It is the Christ to whom we must bow. And I thank you for giving him to us, not only as our king, but also as our priest.

Our great high priest, who even now at your right hand intercedes for us.

Who know him, who trust him, who have staked our everlasting identity on the fact that he died for us upon the cross, bleeding and suffering under your wrath.

What we deserve. We thank you for this living high priest.

And we thank you that he is the great prophet. That though you have spoken in various ways, in various times to the prophets, that even now,

Lord, you have spoken with clear finality for your son, Jesus Christ.

And you have told us what this is all about. We thank you for that.

Lord, I pray that now you would help us by your Holy Spirit to engage in true worship as we hear from you, from your word.

May our lives be the amen here on earth of your will expressed from heaven.

We pray these things in Christ's name, amen. Last time we were together in Jeremiah 30, we heard some very important phrases that show up again in Jeremiah chapters 31 and 32 and elsewhere in the scripture, cluing us in on the importance of this section of scripture.

We heard from Jeremiah chapter 30 about how to think about suffering from a biblical point of view.

How we're to understand God's salvation. What is it that God does to save us? And the importance of the scripture as our box top to the tangle of puzzle pieces.

We try to put these things together. We must keep in mind what the scripture has to say about the suffering we experience and the salvation that Christ brings.

But tucked away in these themes, we also heard the following from verse nine.

But they shall serve the Lord their God. And David, their king, whom I will raise up for them. And here hundreds of years after David has died,

God says, I will raise David up to be their king. This will be an important verse to consider in the following passages, chapters 31 and 32 and following.

Also we hear in verses 21 and 22, their leader, already named

David, their leader shall be one of them and their ruler shall come forth from their midst and I will bring him near and he shall approach me.

For who would dare risk his life to approach me, declares the Lord. You shall be my people and I will be your

God. So after promising a leader by the name of David, a very kingly name, the greatest king of the history of Israel, he then says, their leader will be one of them and I will draw him to me.

I will bring him near and he shall approach me. And this question, for who would dare to risk his life to approach me?

So if you asked a Jew that question, they would know the answer.

And they would say, the high priest. For only one day a year, the day of atonement,

Yom Kippur, would the high priest dare to approach the Lord, to the holy of holies, into the holy of holies he would go with the blood of the sacrifice, just sprinkle it upon the

Ark of the Covenant, upon the mercy seat, the throne of God. And he would dare to do it only after purifying himself and making himself right before God and he would only go with a rope around his ankle and bells on the hem of his garment so that if the jingling stopped, the pulling would begin.

It was risky, dangerous to approach the living God. And so the leader that is promised here in Jeremiah 30 is not only

David, he is a high priest. Now there's a story in the Old Testament about a king who tried to play high priest.

His name was Uzziah. He got so proud of who he was, he thought that in addition to being king, he could also be a priest.

He tried to enter into the holy place.

He tried to approach what only the priests should approach and God struck him on the forehead with leprosy, which spread and he lived as a leper for the rest of his days.

But here we're told that there is going to be a leader and he's David, a king and high priest together in one.

Zechariah calls this the union of the two offices. And these are pictures that point forward to the only person who could be king and priest at the same time.

And that of course was Jesus Christ. Christ meaning Messiah, meaning anointed one.

The kings got anointed, the priests got anointed and the prophets got anointed in the Old Testament.

But Jesus fulfills all the offices, thus he is the anointed, the Messiah, the Christ. We're being told about Jesus in this passage,

Jeremiah 30. We're being told about Christ in this passage. Certainly looking ahead to what's to come.

This language, you shall be my people and I will be your God. That more than what else we've looked at, that language really should capture our attention.

You shall be my people, I will be your God. That's the language of covenant.

It's the language of covenant. And it gets repeated throughout

Jeremiah 31 and 32. I will be their God, they will be my people.

How is it that God will be God to a people and the people will have God as their

God? Well, the scriptures center that relationship around the

Messiah, David who would, David, the raised up David, the true

David, Jesus Christ, the high priest David, the one, the high priest Christ who could only be, the only one who could come between God and his people.

So we're talking about covenant. And our passage in Jeremiah 31 talks about the covenant and the new covenant.

And covenant is a term that appears over 300 times in your

Bible. If you were to count it, depending on your translation, I have a 316, so it's gonna be around there.

316 times the word covenant shows up in the Bible. A very important word.

Two times it shows up in your Bible, but it's translated not covenant, but testament.

So everyone grab your Bible. I hope you brought a Bible today. Some of you brought it on your phone and I will not condemn you.

If you have a physical copy of God's word, what is interesting is just after the introductory remarks and the table of contents, and there is given to you a whole page that simply says the

Old Testament. See that word testament? That's a different English word for the same biblical word covenant.

And indeed, when you move towards the front and you find your way past Malachi, you get another whole page, nothing on it except simply this, the

New Testament. Now what in the world is all that about? You get a whole page just to tell you

Old Testament and a whole page just to tell you New Testament.

And many find it difficult to understand the relationship between the

Old and New Testaments, but we're gonna begin talking about that this morning.

Before we get into the promises of new covenant in chapters 31 and 32 and following,

I thought it would be helpful for us to do a little bit of a survey, to look around the

Bible and see, well, if we're going to talk about the new covenant in Jeremiah 31, it might help for us to understand what in the world is a covenant and then what makes it new.

And that's the title of today's sermon is What's New? What's New? Well, I'm gonna read a couple of passages out of Jeremiah 31, verses one through six and verses 31 through 34.

We will be going back through the chapter in more detail to see how the new covenant fleshes out both in prophecy and in fulfillment.

But I invite you to stand with me as I read from God's word as we hear a word from our King and Savior Jesus Christ verses one through six of chapter 31 and also verses 31 through 34.

At that time declares the Lord, I will be the God of all the families of Israel and they shall be my people.

Thus says the Lord, the people who survived the sword found grace in the wilderness.

Israel, when it went to find its rest, the Lord appeared to him from afar saying,

I have loved you with an everlasting love. Therefore, I have drawn you with loving kindness.

Again, I will build you and you will be rebuilt, O virgin of Israel. Again, you will take up your tambourines and go forth to the dances of the merrymakers.

Again, you will plant vineyards on the hills of Samaria. The planters will plant and will enjoy them for there will be a day when watchmen on the hills of Ephraim call out, arise and let us go up to Zion to the

Lord our God. And verses 31 through 34. Behold, days are coming declares the

Lord where I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah not like the covenant which

I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant which they broke although I was a husband to them declares the

Lord. But this is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel after those days declares the

Lord. I will put my law within them and on their hearts I will write it and I will be their

God and they shall be my people. They will not teach again each man his neighbor and each man his brother saying, no, the

Lord, they will all know me from the least of them to the greatest of them declares the

Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity and their sin I will remember no more.

This is the word of the Lord, you may be seated. Sometimes it can be difficult to understand the relationship between the

Old Testament and the New Testament. I remember meeting my uncle

Robert for the very first time and I love the man. I love the man dearly. And I remember us talking when

I first met him at a family Christmas dinner about how I was studying in Bible college survey of the

Old Testament. And he made some comment about the Old Testament God which is a common thing to say for the

God of the Old Testament in popular imagination seems so different from the

God of the New Testament. But even for those who do not believe a close reading will say it's the same

God. Christopher Hitchens renowned new atheist in his debates said he doesn't like the

New Testament or the Old Testament because he read in the New Testament about Jesus Christ as judge of the world and how he came with violence to kill his enemies.

And so the conception that there is a different God in the Old Testament than in the New is just not true.

It's a popular imagination but a closer reading will tell us that there is consistency between the

Old and the New that it's the same God in the Old as in the New the same Holy Spirit who inspired the writings of the

Old Testament also inspired the writings of the New Testament that it's the same God making the same promises and keeping those promises.

And yet sometimes we don't know how these things come together and what are the differences.

Every major heresy in church history has come from or has resulted in an improper relating of the

Old and New Testaments. Whatever controversies there might be in the history of the church and today controversial discussions about different doctrines and what is heresy and what is orthodoxy, whatever they may be the original controversy in the church was about this.

How do we move from Old Covenant into New Covenant? How do we move from Old Testament to New Testament?

This was the original question. This was the original struggle of the early church. How is it that Gentiles can be saved by the

Jewish Messiah? And do they have any role in the promises of God?

This is the original controversy and I find that for Christians, myself included, that the relationship between Old and New Testament is of supreme interest.

Just how do these things come together? I'll begin with an illustration and I do wanna give you fair warning.

I'm not going to be going deep enough and I'm gonna be piling on too much. So there's the fair warning.

The goal here is to do something of a survey to grab at some categories to start the discussion because we're going to go passage by passage, verse by verse as normal beginning in chapter 31 of Jeremiah but I want you to know where I'm coming from.

Where I'm coming from. So here's an illustration that may help you about the relationship between the

Old Testament and the New Testament. You remember that David, King David, wanted to build a house for the

Lord. He wanted to build God a temple. It came to him one day that he was king of all

Israel, just as God had promised, that God had been so gracious to him and kept all these promises to him and he reigned there in his palace and he had his home and his estate was great and he says, here

I am, I am living in a house but my Lord, my God has only a tent, the tabernacle.

And David got it into his head and into his heart. He wanted to build a house for God, a temple. And word came by Nathan the prophet.

Nathan the prophet said to him, no David, you're not the one who's going to build the temple. We learn from the scriptures that David was disqualified from building the temple because as the scriptures say, he was a man of blood.

There was some defect in him. There was something wrong with him. As a man who had stolen

Uriah's wife and then had Uriah murdered by the hand of his enemies, he was a man of blood.

He was not allowed to build the temple. But Nathan the prophet told him, you're not gonna build

God a house. God is going to build you a house, a royal house, a lineage, descendants that will reign upon the throne of Jerusalem.

I will give you a descendant, God says, the son of David and he will build the temple.

And indeed Solomon did build the temple. When Solomon built the temple, he did not start from scratch.

God told David, you're not allowed to build the temple but he didn't say anything about not getting ready for it.

And David, this was such a passion of his that he gave personally from his own funds, thousands and thousands of articles of gold and silver.

He made preparations in terms of material and stone. And from the

Lord, he received the pattern and the plan for the temple. And he wrote it all down and treasured it.

So it was that David did much preparation. He wrote out the plan on scrolls or on tablets and preserved it, put it all together.

He stored up treasures like gold and silver in raw form, many supplies.

And then, and you can read about this in First Chronicles chapters 28 and 29. And then when

Solomon came of age and it was time for Solomon to reign, David said to him, here are the plans.

And here is the great storehouses that I have filled up ready for your use. It's all here, now you need to build the temple.

And Solomon did build the temple. And the lumps of gold were melted down and crafted into what amounted to gold wallpaper, gold paneling.

The silver was molted down and used for decoration. And the stones were gathered and used to build the temple, all according to the plans that David had written out so carefully crafted.

Now, what's the difference between the plans sitting in a pile of scrolls and the gold and silver and stones in a pile of supplies?

What's the difference between the scrolls and the supplies and the finished product that Solomon built?

Well, you can see the plan of the temple when it was built. You can walk around and look at it. You could measure it.

You could tour the entire structure and see the plan in its full form.

And look, there's the gold that David gathered, but it's on the wall or it's on the cherubim or it's on these chains that are hanging.

And you could see everything that David had prepared for, but it's finally all put together.

And that, dearly beloved, is the connection between Old and New Testament. The Old Testament is

God drawing the plans, putting things together and forecasting what it's going to be like.

And it's him gathering together the raw historical materials, the truths that God revealed through the hard and happy history of Israel.

And it's all put together there as scrolls and supplies. So when you get to the New Testament, when you come to the son of David, Jesus Christ, he puts it all together.

He puts it all together and we see it in its full form. That's the basic trajectory that we need to have when we approach the reading of the scriptures.

Herman Bavick writes, Christ accordingly is the turning point of the times.

The cross, the focal point of world history. First, everything was led in the direction of the cross.

Subsequently, everything was inferred from the cross. This is why

Paul says, not only did he preach the full counsel of the word of God, but he only preached

Christ and him crucified. So what's new?

We move from Old Testament to New Testament, what's new? What's new in covenant is shown true in Christ.

What's new in covenant is shown true in Christ. So let's talk about covenant.

Let's talk about covenant. I'll try to do my best to give a broad overview. We'll see how far we get. This morning,

I believe that an eternity of glorying is going to be far more appropriate than this brief overview of covenant.

There are two words that talk about covenant in the Old and New Testaments. The Hebrew word is berith, and the

Greek word is diatheke. Berith means a cutting, a cutting.

Diatheke means an identity -binding agreement, an identity -binding agreement.

The old thought about covenant was this. If you're making a serious agreement with someone, the custom was to take, let's say, an ox, and you cut it in half, and you pull off the two parts of the carcass, and then you and the partner of the covenant walk through the bloody mess in the middle.

And you're saying to one another, if you break the covenant against me, or if I break the covenant against you, may you or I end up like that thing right behind us.

And that was the kind of serious approach that people would make when they made a covenant.

The theme of covenant is throughout the scriptures. We call marriage a covenant today, which is good, it's right.

What was that covenant in the first marriage? There was a cutting. There was a cutting, and a rib was taken from Adam as he bled for his bride, foreshadowing

Christ bleeding for his bride. And she was created for Adam and brought to Adam, and they came together, and he names her

Eshah, woman taken out of Esh, out of man. And so in the cutting and in the coming together, there was an identity -binding agreement that he was for her and she was for him, that they were together, man and wife.

That's an example of a covenant. There's also a cutting in the covenant that God makes with Abraham, circumcision.

We see this again and again. God relates to us by covenant.

He does this because of who he is as creator and Lord, and who we are as creature and as subject.

He relates to us by covenant. What are the ingredients of covenant? And we see them again and again throughout the scriptures.

Here are the three ingredients. And this is not unique to me. I think Graham Goldsworthy, this is his formulation.

But you see these three ingredients time and again whenever we talk about a covenant. Here are the three ingredients. Pretty simple, people, place, and rule.

People, place, and rule. God's covenant involves his people living in his place, blessed under his rule.

And we first see it in the Garden of Eden. And let's call this the covenant of works.

Who are the people? Well, let's look at Genesis chapter one, how it all began.

God makes man in his own image. In verse 26,

God said, let us make man in our image according to our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.

Now listen to verse 27. God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created him, male and female.

He created them. So there's the people. And they're God's people because they're made in his image.

Okay, there's God's people. And what about his place? Where did he put them?

Well, he put them in Eden, right? Not just the region of Eden, but the Garden of Eden.

Genesis 2 .8, the Lord God planted a garden toward the east in Eden, and there he placed the man whom he had formed.

And then later he made Eve and brought her to him, and there God's people lived in God's place.

And notice that God gave them instructions. God commanded them to be about his will.

And so it is that God's people lived in God's place to be blessed under his rule. Notice verses 26 through 28 of Genesis 1.

Again, listen to the instructions. Let us make man in our image according to our likeness.

Let them rule, that's what they're supposed to do. Let them rule over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the sky, over the cattle, over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.

Now verse 28, God blessed them. God blessed them, and God said to them, here's his instructions, here's what they're supposed to do.

Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it, and rule over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the sky, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.

So do you see their instructions? Do you see how they're supposed to live? He also gave them instructions in chapter two, verses 15 through 17.

Then the Lord God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to cultivate it and keep it. The Lord God commanded the man, saying, from any tree of the garden you may eat freely.

What a blessing. But from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it, you will surely die.

So God makes his people, he puts them into his place, and there they are living, blessed under his rule.

Then what happened? Well, you know, Eve got deceived by the serpent, but the person responsible was

Adam. And Adam gets pointed to again and again as the one who brought sin into the world.

Adam broke the covenant. Hosea six, verse seven, compares

Adam to Ephraim, says, but like Adam, they have transgressed the covenant.

There they have dealt treacherously against me. Just like Israel broke the covenant long before that,

Adam broke the covenant that God made with him. And the punishment was death.

The punishment was a curse of corruption, which is why the scriptures speak of the need of a new Adam. The scriptures speak of the need of a second

Adam, that rather than Adam representing us before God in his failure, we need

Christ representing us before God in his success, in his righteousness, in his goodness, in his perfection.

And God reveals this hope of a different representative of someone who could cover them there in Genesis three.

In Genesis 3, 15, God speaks to the serpent, says, I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your seed and her seed.

He shall bruise you on the head and you shall bruise him on the heel. He shall bruise you on the head and you shall bruise, if the word is actually crush, he shall crush you on the head, you shall crush him on the heel.

And so God promises there is one who will come from the woman, a seed, capital S seed, singular, he, he will crush the head of the serpent, even though his heel will be crushed.

This is a promise of Jesus Christ, our Messiah, our savior.

And then also Genesis three, verse 21, Adam and Eve had sinned.

And when they had sinned, they knew they were naked. They knew they were shameful, but before God and before each other, and then

God does something for them in verse 21. As he kicks them out of the garden, the

Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them. And so he covered their shame to the sacrifice of animals who died for their sins.

The animals were not ashamed. The animals had done nothing wrong, but God slaughters animals and they bleed out and die so that their skins are taken and placed upon the shameful, naked, sinful

Adam and Eve, that they may walk without shame. And this is the picture that launches the entire sacrificial system that we read about in the scriptures and see throughout all of society.

And so we have these ingredients of covenant, God's people in God's place, blessed under God's rule.

We call this the covenant of works, simply to say this, that God made Adam and Eve perfect and righteous and good and said, here's how the blessings will expand.

Here's, here's how the blessings will only multiply is if you follow my commandments, you're gonna fill up this earth with my image and the glory of God will cover the earth as the waters cover the sea.

And this was the plan. This was the instruction given to Adam and Eve. And then they fail, they break

God's covenant. So now, now what do we need? We need grace. We need grace.

No, nobody can go back and do what Adam could do except for one,

Jesus Christ. And so everything from the fall of Adam on in the

Old Testament is pointing forward in some fashion saying, there's one coming, there's one coming, he's going to do it right.

He's gonna set all things right. And we see these expressions of the covenant of grace throughout the

Old Testament. These are not alternatives to when I speak about Noah, Abraham, Israel, and David.

These are not alternatives to grace. These are increasing manifestations of the covenant of grace.

These are not different gospels and alternative gospels. These are previews of the gospel.

These are insights into the gospel. The covenants that God makes with his servants throughout redemptive history, each progressively point to his saving grace.

Let's think about these together. What about Noah? The Bible says that God made a covenant with Noah.

God says, the Bible says that God made a covenant with Adam that he broke, but it also says that he made a covenant with Noah.

God brought Noah and his family out of the ark into a refreshed creation with commands to follow.

So we're talking about in Sunday school this morning, the reason why God filled up the earth with water was because the earth was filled up with violence.

And God brought punishment upon a world full of violence and then basically restarted with Noah.

He gives them instructions to keep about stemming the tide of violence, about how they're supposed to eat in remembrance of this.

And then he makes his covenant with Noah and all of his descendants. And we see grace here in that, although God ought to regularly flood the earth due to our sin, he won't.

Although he should restart every few generations due to the audacity of our sin, he won't.

And he promises never to flood the whole earth again. And what was the sign that he gave? A rainbow.

It is a bow as one would hang up over the front door to hang up the bow, no arrow left in it.

We hang it up because we're done using it. Okay, that's what the bow is. And after the rain, after the storm, we look out, we look for rainbows, don't we?

Oh, I think there's gonna be a rainbow. We send the kids scattering, go see if there's a rainbow. As what we see is the empty bow hanging up, the arrow has been fired.

What grace for God to say, the wrath has been spent.

The wrath has been spent, that's the sign. Who do you think is the destination?

Abraham, God covenants with Abraham and throughout Genesis 12 through 22.

And the content of this covenant entailed Abraham and his descendants living in the promised land, walking before God blameless,

God said. What is that? God's people living in God's place, blessed under God's rule.

God said to Abraham, I'm gonna give you a land. Here's your place. I'm gonna make you a great people.

You will be my people. And you're gonna walk blameless before me, blessed under my rule.

The picture of the cutting of the covenant is given to us in Genesis 15. In Genesis 15,

God encounters Abraham. The word of the Lord came to Abraham.

Abraham's in his tent, he's scared. You ever spend a night awake with fear and worry and anxiety?

Abraham was having one of those nights. The Bible says that the word of the Lord came to Abraham.

And Abraham was discussing the fact that he had no heir, he had no child yet. How are these promises gonna be fulfilled?

He was full of anxiety and fear. And it says that the word of the Lord took him outside. So the word of the

Lord comes into the tent and says, come outside. I love that part. And then they look up together at the stars.

And God says to Abraham, can you count the stars? He says, no, I can't count the stars. And God says, so shall your descendants be.

And Abraham believed. Abraham believed. And it was reckoned to him as righteousness.

Genesis 15, verse six. And then the promise was reiterated about the land that God was gonna give him.

And then Abraham said, how do I know I will possess it? So God gave him this vision. Abraham, he tells

Abraham to prepare the animals. And so he cuts three different animals into pieces and separates them out.

And he gets some birds and he kills them and puts them on the side. And then he waits for the Lord to act. And he chases the buzzards away that come down upon the carcasses.

Until finally God puts him into a deep sleep. And in the vision, Abraham sees smoke and fire going down in between the split animals.

Abraham's not there. It's just God walking down the middle of the covenant. God swearing by himself.

God staking the whole promise on the basis of his own glorious name that God would be gracious to Abraham and to his seed.

And that through him, all the families of the earth will be blessed. And God comes back in Genesis 17 and makes promises, again, makes the promises to Abraham.

Look at verses seven through eight, Genesis 17. Genesis 17, verses seven through eight.

I will establish my covenant between me and you and your descendants after you throughout the generations for an everlasting covenant to be

God to you and your descendants after you, right? I will be your God. You will be my people.

Do you hear it? So here's his people. Verse eight,

I will give to you and your descendants after you the land of your sojournings, all the land of Canaan for an everlasting possession, and I will be their

God. I will be their God. They will be my people. In my place, in the place that I choose in this land.

There's God's people in God's place. And then he says, keep my covenant.

And here's what you're gonna do. Follow the sign of the covenant, which is circumcision, circumcision. Circumcision was a cutting, a setting apart, a removal of uncleanness as the sign.

The sign given to this covenant was circumcision. The rainbow was given to the, as a sign of the covenant that God made with Noah and his descendants.

Circumcision was given to Abraham and his descendants, circumcision. And who fulfills that?

Colossians says that our circumcision is in Christ. Okay, what about, okay,

David. Scripture says that God made, oh, Israel. God made a covenant with Noah, with Adam, with Noah, with Abraham, and with Israel.

So let's look at Exodus chapter 24. This is an important passage, and we're gonna come back to it in future weeks because there is language here that Jeremiah purposefully echoes.

There is language here that Christ purposefully echoes, that the writer to the

Hebrews echoes, here from Exodus 24, very important passage. God has rescued his people from Egypt, as he promised he would, and he's brought them out to the wilderness of Sinai.

He has them at the mountain, Mount Sinai. Then he said to Moses, verse one, come up to the

Lord, you and Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and 70 of the elders of Israel, and you shall worship at a distance.

At a distance, Jeremiah makes note of this, from a distance, God covenants with his people.

Moses alone, however, shall come near to the Lord, but they shall not come near, nor shall the people come up with him. Then Moses came and recounted to the people all the words of the

Lord and all the ordinances, and all the people answered with one voice and said, all the words which the

Lord has spoken, we will do. So here's all of God's people. They're at God's place, Mount Sinai, and they're gonna be blessed under God's rule, doing what

God tells them to do. Moses wrote down all the words of the Lord. Then he rose early in the morning and built an altar at the foot of the mountain with 12 pillars for the 12 tribes of Israel.

He sent young men to the sons of Israel, and they offered burnt offerings and sacrificed young bulls as peace offerings to the

Lord. Moses took half of the blood and put it in basins, and the other half of the blood he sprinkled on the altar.

Then he took the book of the covenant and read it in the hearing of the people, and they said, all that the Lord has spoken, we will do, and we will be obedient.

So Moses took the blood and sprinkled it on the people and said, behold, the blood of the covenant, which the

Lord has made with you in accordance with all these words. And something remarkable happens. Moses, Aaron, Nadab, Abihu, 70 elders, go up the mountain, and they eat with God.

Shortly after, come the instructions of the tabernacle of how God will dwell with them.

My people with me, and I with them. These are all pictures of covenant.

What's the sign? The sign is in accordance with the law, the sprinkling of the blood, the sacrificial system, the whole thing is this sign of the blood.

This is the sign that was given to the covenant that God made with Israel.

And what does Jesus say at the Last Supper? This is the blood of the covenant.

Hebrews says that Jesus is the administrator of a new covenant and the sprinkled blood, which speaks better than that of what

Abel spoke. So the sign of the blood, the sprinkling of the blood, is the sign that goes with the covenant that God made with Israel.

What about with David? God, as we were talking about earlier, God speaks with David through Nathan the prophet and assures him that you will not build the temple, but he says,

I make a covenant with you. Bible says God made a covenant with Adam and with Noah and with Abraham and with Israel and with David.

God says, I make a covenant with you that your descendants will reign and your descendants will always have a throne to reign on in Jerusalem.

You're gonna have an everlasting reigning descendant. And the sign of that will be that the son of David will build the temple.

Son of David will build the temple, that's the sign. The sign is the temple that will be built by the son of David.

And what does Jesus say about the temple? John 2, after he cleanses the temple, he says, destroy this temple in three days and I will raise it up.

And his disciples remembered this after he was resurrected from the dead, he was speaking of his own body, his own self. So when we read in Jeremiah of the covenant that God has made with his people and that there's a new covenant, we have to recognize that what's new, what's new in the new covenant is what's true in Christ.

It's a matter of revelation. We'll talk more about this, Lord willing, next week. The new revelation of who

Christ is and how it is that God's people and God's place and how we submit to God's rule are all made new and revealed new in Christ.

That there is significant and vital difference that comes about between old and new and yet it is in agreement.

It's not like a hard break. It's not that God says plan A failed, now time for plan

B. There is congruence between old and new. Look at your Bibles, right?

We have a title page for Old Testament, we have a title page for New Testament, but look, it's all in the same binding.

And that's a good reminder. There is difference, but there is congruence, that they go together.

And the differences between old and new and the continuity of old and new are both resolved in the person and work of Jesus Christ.

Now, I want us to think in terms of application for a moment. That's a lot of surveying of the

Bible in different doctrinal terms, but I want us to think in terms of some application. We'll talk about signs and their meaning more next week.

But when you see a sign on the side of a road, you're looking for the sign that tells you where you wanna go.

We take our trips to Tennessee to visit our dear friends there. We're coming back home, we see the sign that says

Oklahoma City. And for some reason, they put these signs for every 10 miles, you know, on I -40.

It's like, oh, it's 10 more miles. We don't stop at the sign that says

Oklahoma City, 86 miles. We don't stop and say, we have arrived. It's a sign to point to the destination.

And the signs that were given in the covenants are not destinations. They point towards someone.

Think about what these signs do when they are fractured and removed from the destination.

What did it do to the Jews of Jeremiah's day and the Jews of Christ's day when the temple, which is the sign of the covenant

God made with David, when the temple was divorced from Christ? The Jews of Jeremiah day thought they were holy and righteous and good with God simply because they had the temple.

And their chant was, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord. What about the

Jews in Jesus' day? They too idolized and worshiped the temple. All their efforts were spent on beautifying the temple.

They were willing to rob a widow of her last two mites simply to put a little more bling on their temple.

They were very proud of their temple. And Jesus, in response, said, truly, truly,

I say to you, not one stone will be left upon the other. Jesus said that those who advocated for that kind of temple worship, who divorced the temple as the sign away from him who was the reality, he said that they went about and made proselytes twice the son of hell that they were.

So what is the sign divorced from Christ? It's damnation, it's doom, it's a kind of servile legalism from which you never emerge.

What about the sign of the sprinkled blood? What about the law and the sacrifices?

What happens with them when they are divorced from Christ? It's legalism again, isn't it?

It's do this, do this, do this. The reminder even in the Old Testament, God spoke to them and said, don't you understand how this higher obedience more than sacrifice, it's not about going about and doing all the sacrifices, it's about your love for me.

When the sign, the sprinkling of the blood is divorced from Christ, then that becomes God and that becomes the thing that you worship.

What about circumcision? Was that a problem in the New Testament? As the church tried to find a way to live together as Jew and Gentile, circumcision divorced from Christ who's the fulfillment of circumcision became its own false gospel.

Galatians, it's the reason why Galatians was written because people were going about saying you have to be circumcised in order to be saved because they read the sign and divorced it from Christ.

And then how did that happen? He said, well, I don't have any trouble focusing on a temple or sprinkled blood or circumcision outside of Christ and tied up in that legalism.

But you know, there are other things. There are other things that when you divorce them from Christ become the new master.

Consider the rainbow. Has the rainbow been divorced from Christ?

What does the rainbow now stand for? Nonjudgmental acceptance and tolerance with everybody on planet earth.

Well, you know, they got that part right. The rainbow is a bow set up with the arrow now gone and spent.

The whole sign says no judgment. That's what the sign says.

But when you divorce it from Christ, it's no judgment in Christ. It's no judgment in the one who saves.

You divorce it from Christ and then it becomes a totalitarian legalism that forces everybody to live in someone's perspective of what nonjudgmental means.

Take any of the signs, divorce it from Christ, and what do you end up with?

So my encouragement as we walk through this time of looking at old and new and how they coalesce in Christ, my plea for you is to not lose sight of Christ in these scriptures.

There's a lot of interesting things in here. There's a lot of intriguing things in here about Israel, about history, about the early church, about different practices.

But listen, there's one reason why God wrote this book and it's to go on and on about his son, all right?

Let me close with a word of prayer. Father, I thank you for the time you've given us. Lord, I pray it's been helpful.

I pray that it advantages us and gets us ready for what we're going to see next. Lord, please help us to do a right reading of your word, the kind of reading that Jesus would hear us read and say, that's right, that's right.

That we wouldn't read the scripture and then have to hear Jesus say, have you never read?

Don't you know? God, give us this grace. That we would read the scriptures as Jesus did, in agreement with how his apostles read it.

That we would not lose sight of the one who brings about the fullness of this covenant of grace,

Jesus Christ, the one mediator between God and man.

We thank you for him, for our salvation, which is in him and him alone, in his cross, in his righteous life and death and resurrection.